


Sound Salvation

by syrupwit



Category: Danger Days: The True Lives of the Fabulous Killjoys (Album), My Chemical Romance
Genre: Drug Addiction, F/M, Gen, Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, Implied/Referenced Character Death, M/M, Mental Health Issues, Non-Graphic Violence, Substance Abuse, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-14
Updated: 2015-09-14
Packaged: 2018-04-16 17:56:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 4,825
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4634772
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/syrupwit/pseuds/syrupwit
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A complement work for fisa_is_your_friend's Killjoys fanmix <em><a href="http://bandombigbang.dreamwidth.org/60777.html">A Savior Came My Way</a></em>.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. gaze into empty eyes

Ray died. But it was okay: he came back.

“I feel great, actually,” he was saying to Matt and Mikey when Gerard finally walked into the kitchen. They were going out tonight to celebrate Ray’s new life. They’d been supposed to leave about an hour ago, but Gerard’s dosages had been switched around recently and it was taking him a long time to do anything. Gerard was supposed to adjust fully by next week. In the meantime, though, he didn’t have to go to work, he slept a lot and moved slowly, and he kept forgetting where he’d put things down.

“Sleeping Beauty awakens!” said Matt. He screwed up his nose as Gerard approached. “When was the last time you showered, dude? Or washed those clothes?”

While Gerard pondered these questions, Mikey groaned. “Can we just go? It’ll take him another hour to change. You’re going to get so wasted you won’t notice the smell anyway.”

“Fine, but you’re sitting next to him.”

“I don’t think it’s that bad,” said Ray. He smiled at Gerard, and Gerard tried to smile back. It was a little weird, interacting with this new version of Ray. Maybe it was Gerard’s new dosages, maybe it was the cocktail of revival support drugs Ray had been taking and was now tapering off, but—anyway, it was weird.

“ _You_ can sit with him, then,” said Matt, and everyone laughed.

They took the metro, because no one had a car and cabs were way too expensive. Matt had a bike, but he said there was no way in hell he was letting any of them near it, and anyway he definitely wouldn’t be in any shape to ride it by the end of the night.

“Matt,” said Gerard, “Matt, dude, you keep saying stuff like that, it’s kinda worrying me. It’s like you’ve witnessed,” and here Gerard took a minute to think, because the words kept slithering away from him, “It’s like you’ve witnessed this, for lack of a better word, _miracle_ with Ray, and it’s setting off this complementary, this, like, balancing impulse inside you, where you’re seeking self-destruction to balance the scales of life and death. Like—” Here Gerard lost his train of thought and, turning as if to follow it, made unintentional eye contact with a woman sitting across from him. She looked away quickly and put her hands over her purse.

“Don’t kill yourself on my account, Matt,” said Ray, amused.

“Man, Gerard.” Matt shook his head. “I’d ask for some of what you’re on, but it does not seem like a good time.”

Mikey put an arm around Gerard’s shoulder. He was a little irritated, Gerard could tell, but he was concerned too. “Nobody’s dying tonight. It’s going to be fun, okay?”

\--

It was fun. The club they went to had drinks and drugs and dancing. It turned out that Ray had a special credit on his ID for dying, and that bumped them to the front of the line to get in. Inside, there was live music (performed by an approved BLI-sponsored band, of course). The singer wasn’t great, but the band could keep in time.

There were a lot of people in the club. It was a hot, close night to begin with; it didn’t help that there were so many people. The club floor swam with white spotlights, playing across skin and hair and clothes. Wall-spanning screens flashed corporate messages of prosperity. Gerard was exhorted to relax, to unwind, and to leave his troubles behind. He tried. For a little while, he lost himself in the lights and music, in the numbness already sitting thick around his skull. This was easy. Or, if it wasn’t easy, at least it beat the other thing, the other easy thing that was always waiting somewhere in his head. God, he hated adjusting to new meds.

The band played something dark and repetitive, underlaid with a hypnotic thumping backbeat. The singer strutted across the stage and sang about finding satisfaction.

Gerard made it about an hour inside the club—buying congratulatory drinks for Ray, dancing awkwardly alongside Matt, trying to keep an eye on Mikey as Mikey wove in and out of the masses of moshing party kids—before he headed for the door.

Outside was barely cooler than inside. Though the high mesh ceiling of the club deck was vented open, the tall, solid fence around its perimeter prevented much heat from escaping. Other people were hanging around on the deck, but they were all further down, sitting in hushed conference or slumped in corners alone. Gerard took out a cigarette and watched the sky through the mesh. He felt better, but maybe he also felt worse. He was trying to figure out where his lighter was and whether a particularly stationary-seeming drone light was in fact, incredibly, a star when someone came up behind him.

“Gerard?” It was Ray.

“Hey,” said Gerard. He set the unlit cigarette down and hoped he wouldn’t forget it. Cigarettes didn’t grow on trees, after all. Well, there weren’t really trees in California anymore—but, if there had been, cigarettes wouldn’t have grown on them. Probably. It wasn’t even real tobacco, of course. Some kind of synthetic or something. “What’s up?”

“Just wanted to check on you.” Ray moved closer, so he was within Gerard’s line of vision when Gerard turned his head.

“Isn’t that the kind of thing I’m supposed to say to you?”

Ray shrugged. “I feel good. I’m okay. It seems like you might not be.”

“It’s just drugs. I’ll be fine.” The heavy band of numbness around Gerard’s head was starting to lighten, which wasn’t good. He’d have a headache soon. He needed to do something, take something or drink something or pass out, or else things could get bad.

“Okay.” Ray was quiet for a moment. Then he said, “I haven’t dreamed since I came back.”

“Yeah?”

“Yeah.” Ray looked away, and when he looked back he was smiling. “I used to have the worst fucking dreams, you know? About _before_. I didn’t have them that often, but when I did, they were so bad. And now…” He spread his hands, eyes crinkled, face alight. “I never have to feel that again. That’s what they told me. They went inside and tweaked something when they brought me back, and I take one more pill once a week, and now I never have to have those dreams again.”

“Wow,” said Gerard, for lack of anything else to say.

“I’m just saying, if it doesn’t get better soon, you should go in and see someone. Find out what they can do for you.” Ray clapped him on the back. “Okay, I’m going back in. See you soon, Gerard.”

“See you,” Gerard echoed. He stood alone for a few minutes, staring at what was almost definitely just a drone. Then he followed Ray back inside.

\--

Everything was bright white or pitch black, too near, too hot, and too loud; but it was okay, it was good, it was all good. There had been uppers and downers (and drinks) and little smiley-faced antiemetics, and Gerard just wanted more. But also he needed a smoke.

“Outside,” he screamed or slurred in Mikey’s ear. Mikey grunted, hands tight on someone’s shifting hips. His eyes were far away. Gerard smacked a kiss to Mikey’s cheek and slipped off the dancefloor. He thought he saw Ray talking to someone across the room, thought he heard Matt’s laughter over near the bar. He wove unsteadily through faceless crowds to the door.

The cigarette was sitting on a table, right where Gerard had left it (well, several tables further down than he remembered, but close all the same). Gerard took a moment to feel proud of himself before resuming the search for his lighter. Beyond the ringing in his ears and the muffled roar of the club, the deck seemed quiet, deserted even.

He took a triumphant first drag on the cigarette, and then a more casual second one, and his mind was starting to drift into a glazed approximation of calm when someone coughed by his elbow.

“Got another?” It was the singer, glassy eyes huge in a narrow face. Gerard did a double take, then remembered that the band had gone offstage for a break, leaving the clubgoers to gyrate to stretched-out, lyricless remixes.

“Uh, sure,” said Gerard. He fumbled for the pack in his back pocket. No, his other back pocket. No, the pocket inside his jacket. He held the cigarette and lighter out to the singer, who accepted and then promptly dropped them.

“It’s fine man, it’s fine,” said the singer, waving Gerard away when he stooped to help him pick them up.

A few years ago, when the world had seemed less stable and memories of _before_ had lived fresher in everyone’s heads, Gerard and Matt had talked about starting a band. Then they’d actually done it, sent in an application, and they had gotten as far as the second trial audition before they were disqualified for unspecified reasons. (Looking back, Gerard could muster a number of persuasive guesses as to what those reasons might have been, but at the time the rejection had been quite a blow.) Sometimes he still wondered how things would be now, if they’d made it. If it could be him and Matt and maybe Mikey and even Ray up on that stage. Mikey had never played music, but he liked it. Ray never talked about music—he showed reticence in discussing most personal topics, especially ones that might be related to the past—but Gerard had _felt_ the way Ray listened to it, and it made him think that maybe—

“Uh, what?” The singer stared at him. Gerard realized that he had been thinking at least partly aloud, and cut himself off.

“Nice set, man,” he said instead. “I liked the, uh, the one...what was it called? Something about the fast track to personal fulfillment? That was pretty good.”

The singer kept staring at Gerard like he was from outer space, so Gerard smiled, which maybe didn’t help.

“Thanks,” the singer answered at last, but warily, like he didn’t know what Gerard was talking about. “Here’s your light.” He gave the lighter back and moved away. They finished their cigarettes without speaking again.

When Gerard got back inside, no one was dancing. Lights still roamed the dance floor and bass still shook the walls, but the screens were dark and the crowd amassed around the dance floor’s edges was largely unmoving. A kid lay collapsed in the middle of the room.

For a second, Gerard thought the kid was Mikey, and his chest seized up. Then he spotted Ray standing to the side of the crowd, and next to him were Matt and Mikey. Gerard ran over to them.

“Man, what a night,” said Ray, smiling. He shook his head. “Crazy night.”

“You’re having fun, though, right?”

“Yeah, I’m having fun.”

The kid was taken away by medics, or at least by people who looked like medics. They didn’t turn down the music at any point. By the time the possibly-medics were hauling the kid out the door, people had taken back most of the dance floor.

After that, the night was over. Well, it wasn’t _over_ , there were a couple of hours till curfew yet; however, it was over as far as Gerard’s buzz was concerned. He made a few fruitless attempts to chase after oblivion at the bar, but he kept looking around to check on Mikey, and overall the whole thing made him paranoid more than it soothed him. He was relieved when they left the club for the night and boarded the metro home.

On the metro, they all sat in a sloppy, sleepy row together. Gerard watched their reflections in the glass across from him, the deep shadows in their clothes and under their eyes.

“Do you think that kid was dead?” he asked.

“What kid?” Ray murmured.

“In the club. The one who passed out. What happened? Did they OD? Did you see if they were breathing? I couldn’t tell.”

From the seat next to Gerard, Matt laughed (Mikey had been right, he’d gotten too wasted to care about Gerard’s hygiene-related failings). “The kid’s fine, Gerard. And if not, it’s like you were saying. Life and death. Balance, right?”

“No one’s dying on my account,” said Ray peacefully.

Mikey dozed on Gerard’s other side, his hand resting limply in Gerard’s. Gerard shut his eyes and let nothingness wash him away.

\--

The next week, Gerard went back to the clinic for a follow-up appointment. He remembered to tear himself away from the couch and Mousekat reruns long enough to shower and even managed to find clean clothes to wear. At the clinic, a nurse took his stats, someone else drew blood, and the doctor asked questions and narrowed her eyes sympathetically at his answers.

“It sounds like you’ve been doing well, but there are still a few items that concern me. I’m going to recommend that you be placed on an even higher dosage.”

“But I’ve already missed a lot of work,” said Gerard. It was true; he had no idea how he was going to catch up. Though, if his voice shook a little, it wasn’t due to concern over work.

“Some things are more important than work,” said the doctor kindly. “And this will make you better at your job. You may experience increased sluggishness at first, perhaps some more fatigue and a touch of brain fog, but I guarantee you’ll be back to pleasant productivity before you know it.”

She gave him two new prescriptions, a selection of sample packs, and another week off work. He thanked her awkwardly, and she demurred with pre-packaged courtesy. “It’s what we’re here for. All part of building a better you.”

On her way out of the examination room, the doctor asked, as if it were an afterthought, “Have you ever considered dying, Mr. Way?”

“I, uh,” said Gerard, and shook his head.

“Just give us a call if you’re interested. We’re always here if you want to know more.”

Gerard got his prescriptions filled at the clinic’s in-house pharmacy, courtesy of a smiling young clerk who wouldn’t stop talking about the vid he’d seen last week. He took the metro home, stopping for groceries along the way. He couldn’t really afford them, but Mikey was working extra hours this week and had lately developed a habit of sighing loudly while standing in front of open cupboards.

At home, Gerard put away the more perishable groceries, used the bathroom, and made a stab at clearing up the mess in the front. He took out his new prescriptions and lined them up on the kitchen counter, a display of bottles and boxes in slick black and white.

Each pill container was equipped with a sensor that would send out an alert when too many dosages were accessed at once, a fact Gerard had learned the hard way. So he counted out a single day’s portion from each.

Gerard filled a glass with water and set it on the counter. He gathered the pills and cradled them in one hand, feeling their weight and shape, turning his hand from side to side. The coating on some of them wore off in the heat of his palm, and it shimmered against his skin where the light caught it. He didn’t realize he was gripping the counter with his other hand until his fingers started to hurt.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This chapter is not meant to comment on or reflect my views regarding psychiatric medication, a valuable technology that has improved my life.


	2. just a casual casualty

Battery City was at war. This could be easy to forget if you lived inside the city. You heard about criminals on the news broadcasts, of course, and saw police and military as you went about your day. At times, certain districts and neighborhoods were subjected to checkpoints or quarantined or even evacuated. There was a sense of vague ambient danger, but it seemed distant, as far from the reality of present life as the radioactive wasteland beyond Zone 6.

Moving from the city’s center to its outskirts, it became more difficult to ignore the signs of—well, not of war, but of something larger and more complex than an occasionally impacted peace. The police were more numerous and more heavily armed. There were fewer roads open for public use, more routes designated for military only. Checkpoints appeared to be permanent and mandatory. Curfews were increasingly restrictive. Criminals’ faces were posted everywhere, not just presented on news broadcasts, and you were warned to watch for a wider assortment of perpetrators and crimes.

After Better Living Industries discovered that Gerard had not been adhering to the regimen of medications meant to eventually transform him into a hollowed-out puppet suitable for use as a musical mouthpiece or figurehead, a fate that had been selected for him moments after he and Matt had performed at their first audition, and that he had in fact been conducting seditious activity from inside the very bedroom where he was supposedly confined as an invalid—After an acquaintance accidentally tipped Gerard off that BLI was planning to raid his apartment, forcing Gerard to steal Matt’s bike in order to flee the city and to in the process sever or at least severely strain several significant bonds of friendship and brotherhood—After Gerard made it out into the Zones and started living as a fugitive, the idea that anyone might be able to _forget_ there was a war going on became odd and crazy and in a way completely horrible.


	3. may have gone too far

Frank found Gerard off Route Holy, just past the entrance to Wolfskill Canyon. At the time, Frank and a friend were transporting assorted metal scrap items to the dealer who would eventually come to call himself Tommy Chow Mein. Gerard was concussed and bleeding out, lying unconscious next to the wreck of Matt’s bike.

The wreck was what caught Frank’s eye. He hadn’t meant to stop. Sunset was coming, and the canyon hosted a nasty scene after dark. But their haul so far had been smaller than expected, and then the truck’s headlights glinted off the mangled bike, and he thought, _Why not?_

It was kind of a shock to find a guy there, especially one in Battery City’s civilian uniform, especially one as pale and soft-faced as Gerard. The canyon was pretty far out for a tourist. Perhaps that was why no one had retrieved Gerard yet. A SCARECROW patrol was sure to find him in a day or so, but he’d almost certainly be dead by then, and one of the worse kinds of dead at that. It would take a long time to bring him back, it would hurt, and there was no guarantee he’d come back anything like he’d been before...

Frank and his friend mutually agreed to leave Gerard, and then mutually changed their minds to take him with them. As some deaths were better than other deaths, so were some debts better than other debts. They fixed Gerard up as best they could with a first aid kit, supplemented by rags, duct tape, and a bottle of moonshine. Frank radioed the dealer to say they’d be a little late, while his (taller, bulkier) friend heaved Gerard into the compartment behind the front seat that served alternately as a rest area and a holding cell. Then they took him to the Medicine Lord’s, carried him to the doorstep, honked, and drove away.

Despite the name, the Medicine Lord was a woman. She was tiny and mean and impressively old, and wore body armor under her stained lab coat. The Medicine Lord lived in a little shack on top of a bunker out in Zone 3. The bunker housed two beds; a hoard of medical equipment and supplies scavenged from various sources; an extensive maze of locked cold cases and laboratories holding god knew what; a robot orderly; and the Medicine Lord’s head nurse slash only nurse slash bodyguard, Ziggy. Ziggy drove a hearse, shaved half her head, and had a pretty fucking sick tattoo of a bleeding, mutated heart on her left breast, over and around a surgical scar. Frank’s friend had absolutely thrashed Ziggy at poker once, and they’d nearly come to blows afterward. Some tension lingered there.

A few days later, when Gerard returned to consciousness—trapped underground, hooked up to an ancient IV, his last memory a blurred impression of being pursued down the highway—he quite understandably lost his shit. While Ziggy watched, arms crossed over her chest, Gerard flailed and shouted and made threats that he was in no condition to carry out. At length he began to weep. Ziggy went to fetch him a decade-old sealed cup of juice from one of the cold cases. By the time she had returned, bearing a choice of cranberry or orange, he’d calmed down enough to ask her about her tattoo.

Gerard stayed with Ziggy and the Medicine Lord for several months. After he was good to walk, he slept upstairs in the shack and helped out. He liked Ziggy and the robot and lived in fear of the Medicine Lord. Ziggy liked him too. They traded ghost stories—Ziggy had tons, and Gerard found he remembered more than he'd thought—and Ziggy showed him how to do things. What they never did was talk about the past—the real past, not just _before_. Gerard tried to tell Ziggy that his name was Gee, and she waved him off and told him to pick a new one. He never got around to it. They didn't get around to discussing what the Medicine Lord really did all day or why Ziggy was there, either, though it was alluded to in several conversations that Ziggy owed the Medicine Lord some sort of debt that could never be repaid. It was understood that Gerard owed her too, but in a different way. He wasn't bound there, not like Ziggy was. It was a future-oriented debt that would be collected someday. 

(Within a year, the shack would be torn down, Ziggy would be dusted, and the Medicine Lord would have vanished into the desert.)

Sometimes Ziggy brought Gerard along when she ran errands in the hearse. Here is neither time nor space sufficient to recount their experiences, but be assured that they involved fast driving, narrow escapes, and unsettling discoveries, as well as drugs, blood, viscera, glitter, and explosions. It was on one of these errands, a venture into a nightclub to collect one of the Medicine Lord’s debts, that Gerard met Frank again.

At this time, Frank was not at his best. His friend had disappeared after heading out to a party with some lady droids down in Zone 6, a party that had fallen victim to a SCARECROW raid. Odds were good that Frank’s friend now resided in a torture hospital, or, if not, that she had already been reintroduced to Battery City society as a mind-wiped actuarial assistant or front desk receptionist or literal button-pusher. They had been partners for two years. Frank was out to kill.

Ziggy had not received news of the fate of Frank’s missing friend. Consequently, upon finding him in the crush of the nightclub, she greeted him by questioning his friend’s whereabouts in a disparaging way. Frank, already sporting a black eye and an assortment of half-healed wounds under his clothes, tried to knock all her teeth out of her head.

Gerard intervened. Frank punched Gerard. Ziggy punched Frank, Frank recognized Gerard, someone else tried to shank Ziggy, and a melee began. There was a band playing the nightclub, and even they got involved.

Later, outside—Ziggy, though winded from battle, had gone off to pursue the debt again, and would return in half an hour with renewed energy and blood drying under her nails—Frank and Gerard stood holding their faces and smoking, and talked.

Gerard thought of the places he had been and the people he had met. He thought of rubber masks and white paint and the way Ray’s smile had changed after he'd come back from the dead. He thought of the horrible thing that threatened to overwhelm him still, the thing that sat on his chest at night like a living creature and lurked in his peripherals in the neon daylight. He thought of Frank, alive in front of him, bright tattoos overlaid with bruises and body quietly tense with despair. He even allowed himself to think of Mikey, who was alone in the city, who by this time might no longer remember that Gerard existed. 

Frank took a drag on his cigarette and spat out the ashes.

“Why don’t we go get her?“ said Gerard.


	4. never never want to go home

They got her.

Gerard's throat burned, a handprint seared on either side. His mind swam with far more questions than answers. Korse’s face still floated in front of his eyes. But Mikey’s ( _Mikey’s_ ) hand was tucked sweaty in his, and the insistent vibration of the driver’s side front window meant that they were speeding safely far into the desert.

It was weeks before Mikey could sleep normally again. It was months before the drugs were all out of him.

In the ruins of a truck stop big box store, they dyed their hair new colors: black, blue, white-blond, a fire-engine red that echoed the pink crusting scars below Gerard's chin. Frank's friend picked out a new name, and Frank tattooed it on her with a needle that, Gerard panicked, had not been sterilized enough. That night they stayed up till dawn and made up stories about the people they wanted to be.

Frank's friend left after two days. Frank didn't seem too shaken up when Gerard approached him about it.

“Weren't you, you know,” said Gerard.

“Oh, we're not like that,” said Frank. “Well,” he amended, at Gerard's widened eyes, “we’re a little like that. But it's not _like that_ , you know, it's not...you know. ”

(Gerard did not know, but later on he would; and, at the conclusion of an excruciatingly lengthy and suspenseful and dangerous situation to take place some months in the future, both he and Frank would become aware that the two of them were definitely, absolutely, 110% _like that_.)

They took turns driving while Mikey shook and sweated in the backseat—Gerard sometimes scrambling back there from the passenger seat to check on him—and every song they found on the radio drove them forward, forward, forward.


	5. i want to make them wish they’d never seen me

It turned out that Ray—

It turned out that _Jet Star_ had a kid.

“Of course I’m telling her she’s my fucking kid,” Jet Star said, like there was no question. “As soon as I meet her, that’s the first thing I’m going to say: You’re my kid. I’m your dad. These people are lying pigs, et cetera, et cetera.”

The Kid—not Jet Star’s kid, but Mikey, who they’d all started calling Kobra Kid, which proved satisfactorily and forever that Gerard was not the only person who would always think of him that way—seemed to believe there was a question. He said, “We don’t know how bad they got her, though. For all we know, they could have turned her around so she’d only be able to think that _you_ were the lying pig.”

Jet Star put down the equipment he’d been tinkering with and folded his arms across his chest. “I used to think you guys were lying pigs, and you got me back.”

“I’m not saying we shouldn’t go get her. I’m just saying that maybe,” in an uncharacteristically sensitive gesture, the Kid took a moment to choose his words, “maybe we should be careful what we tell her. At first, at least.”

“Well, what do you suggest we say? It’s not like she won’t see the guns. And there are all those posters floating around and shit. She’s going to have some idea who we are.”

Gerard listened but didn’t say anything, because he was cleaning the food area. It wasn’t a kitchen; it was a food area. Frank would be back soon, and he liked it when the food area was clean. (Like. A lot.) Though he’d probably tell Gerard he’d done everything wrong and just clean it himself. Either way, Gerard won.

So Gerard was still cleaning the food area, and he wasn't _saying_ anything, but he was thinking. And he happened to think aloud. “Where will she sleep?” There was nowhere. There wasn't even enough room for all of them to sleep at once. Could she sleep in the sink? No she couldn't. Where?

“We'll burn that bridge when we come to it, Poison,” said Jet Star grimly, and the corner of Mikey’s mouth flickered in a way that told Gerard he was laughing inside. 

Static fizzed on the radio. The channel was dead for now, but it would come alive again. They just had to wait. Someone would always come through.


End file.
